Page 42 of Waves of Time
“Please,” Hilary said, closing her eyes. Aria wanted to ask if she saw the bright lights again and if she had pain, but she didn’t.
“Okay. Let’s see. It was twenty-two years and three months ago, if my math is correct,” Marc said with a smile. “We were just twenty-one years old. Babies, in fact.” Marc laughed. “And I had forced you to come to a party at a friend of a friend’s, a guy I was pretty sure was going to boost me to the big leagues of business. Gosh, I was so driven back then.”
“Too driven, if you ask me,” Hilary said, not unkindly.
Marc laughed again. “You told me over and over again that you didn’t want to go to that party. That you were too tired and that you didn’t feel well. But I told you that once I became someone, once I got the very best job in the world, I would give you anything you wanted. But all that hinged, in my mind, on going to that stupid dinner party.”
“I couldn’t talk you out of it,” Hilary said. “And I guess I went, ultimately, because I thought I could make you miserable during it. Or, maybe, a part of me actually believed what you said about that grand life you were so convinced we could have together. You were always very persuasive back then.”
Marc’s eyes glistened with tears that he refused to let fall. “So, we got all dressed up for the party. Your mother looked ridiculously good, just as she always did, and I looked like a schlump she’d agreed to let follow her around. We got to the party and sat down with these guys I knew from the business school. Their girlfriends were there, too.”
“But you forget. The girlfriends were buzzing around, serving everyone food,” Hilary reminded him. “I hated that. I asked the men if they knew how to wash their own dishes, and they all avoided my eyes.”
“It started out rough,” Marc admitted. “I could already tell Hilary was annoyed at them for not helping out and for…”
“Upholding male and female stereotypes!” Hilary cried in a way that made Aria believe that maybe she was feeling okay right now.
“Anyway, as time passed, it became increasingly clear that these guys from the business school were not the kind of guys I wanted to hang around. They weren’t kind, for one. And for two, they made horrible jokes that made even me uncomfortable. Hilary, of course, was fuming.”
Hilary nodded. “I couldn’t stand those guys. They were so sure of themselves —so sure that the world had been made just for them.”
“I was trying to make an excuse to get us out of there after dinner, but one of the guys launched into a story about how he’d already made one million, mostly on his own, because his father had given him five-hundred thousand to start his own business. Hilary was livid.”
“I remember looking at him and saying, ‘You really think you made all that on your own? You don’t see that your father did everything for you?’ And then, suddenly, everything in my stomach went south.”
Marc laughed wildly, throwing his head back. “She stood up and ran to the bathroom but didn’t have time to close the door behind her. Together, me and these very confident and self-assured businesspeople, who I’d always wanted to impress, listened as your mother vomited in the bathroom.”
Hilary smiled proudly at the balcony table, as though she liked reliving this memory.
“It was awkward, to say the least,” Marc said, his eyes dancing. “When she came out of the bathroom, she glared at the entire table, then pointed at me and said, very clearly, ‘I’m pregnant with your baby. How’s that for a business proposition?’ And then, she walked out.”
Aria’s jaw dropped as Hilary burst into laughter before her, as though she’d never heard anything funnier in her life. Aria’s eyes turned between her mother and father as they shared this most delicious of stories.
“What happened after that?” Aria begged to know.
“I ran after her, of course,” Marc said. “We probably spent the rest of the night fighting.”
“Or doing something else,” Hilary joked.
“Maybe a bit of both,” Marc agreed.
Aria rolled her eyes and studied her shoes as her father and mother exchanged a few other words about the horrible men they’d been at dinner with, where they’d ended up over the years, and the fact that Marc had always avoided them like the plague.
“Seems like things worked out for you, even though we stormed out of that party,” Hilary said, then yawned.
“And it seems like you might actually be tired,” Marc pointed out.
Hilary nodded. “I admit that I could sleep. I can’t believe it, either.”
Marc left Aria on the balcony, wrapped up in a blanket, as he led Hilary inside to get her situated in one of the guest bedrooms. Aria waited, her thoughts whirring, for a good ten minutes before Marc returned to the balcony.
“She washed her face and fell into bed,” Marc explained quietly. “She’s already out like a light.”
“No way,” Aria breathed. “I’m so glad. I think she was driving herself crazy.”
Marc nodded, refilled his glass of wine, and gazed across San Francisco rooftops. “How long have you known about this?”
“Just since Sunday,” Aria said. “But I noticed she wasn’t as visually sharp as normal. I just didn’t imagine it was as bad as this.”